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Credit Marisa Scheinfeld

Resorts Reborn in Decay

By John LelandMay. 4, 2013May. 4, 2013

They were the grand palaces of her childhood, the fortress hotels where her family celebrated Jewish holidays, where a girl from the Catskills could run wild or hear stories about how her grandparents met. She learned to swim in the pool at one hotel and worked as a summer lifeguard at another. Then, when she left for college on the West Coast, Marisa Scheinfeld, 32, found herself “grappling with homesickness.”

“I had a need to reconnect with myself,” she said.

That need drove her back to the mountains and a way of life that had fallen into ruins, as many of the borscht belt resorts were closed and abandoned. Where she had once been a child in a state of protected summer grace, she was now a trespasser and an “archaeologist,” Ms. Scheinfeld said.

“Nature was reclaiming the spaces,” she said. “You would see an entire room filled with a carpet of moss. Then there was vandalism, people gutting the buildings for wiring and other metal, anything they could take. Then there were squatters and taggers. Then paintballers, who put their own marks on the places. I began to see that these hotels were taking on new life.”

Using a strategy of “rephotography” advanced by the photographer Mark Klett, who recreated iconic scenes of the American West, Ms. Scheinfeld started revisiting scenes from Catskills postcards and other photographs, then wandering wherever her eye took her. The results are portraits of destruction as well as rebirth, now numbering almost 100 photographs, which she hopes to publish as a book.

“I didn’t want to make the pictures all about decay,” she said. “I see beauty and growth in the pictures as well. The decay is linked to a cycle of regeneration. There’s something still there, even if people think it’s washed away.”